With their typically warm and insightful style, two amateur antiquarian book collectors reveal one of the dirty secrets of the book collecting world: forgeries.

Journey into the world of book collecting with the Goldstones-rediscover the joy of reading, laugh, and fall in love with books all over again. The idea that books had stories associated with them that had nothing to do with the stories inside them was new to us. We had always valued the history, the world of ideas contained between the covers of a book or, as in the case of The Night Visitor, some special personal significance. Now, for the first time, we began to appreciate that there was a history and a world of ideas embodied by the books themselves. Part travel story, part love story, and part memoir, Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's Used and Rare provides a delightful love letter to book lovers everywhere.

Charles M. Schulz: The Life and Art of the Creator of Peanuts in 100 Objects explores the man behind one of America’s most iconic comic strips and its beloved cast of characters—Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts Gang. Through 100 preserved and cataloged artifacts, delve into Charles M. Schulz’s Minnesota youth in 1920s America, Schulz’s WWII Army service, and Schulz’s path to fame through his post-war comic series Li’l Folks and five decades of Peanuts. From Schulz’s first published drawing featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! to his 2001 Congressional Gold Medal, the 100 artifacts bring the details of the singular artist to life. Along with provocative, witty, and wise quotes, fan-favorite strips, and more, this book is a must-have for any Peanuts fan. 100 OBJECTS: Carefully curated artifacts from Charles M. Schulz’s home and studio—including medals and awards, family photos, rare comic art, and more—tell the story of this beloved artist’s life, career, and the times in which he lived. EXPLORE AMERICANA: From his youth in 1920’s Minnesota through the turbulent 60s and beyond, Charles Schulz’s life spans the rich history of the American Century. CLASSIC STRIPS: Includes timeless Peanuts comic strips featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the whole Peanuts Gang. FASCINATING FACTS: Fans of Peanuts will find never-before-seen items that give them an intimate look at the creation of the acclaimed comic strip series. OFFICIAL ACCOUNT: Created in collaboration with the Charles M. Schulz estate, the book provides an exclusive look into the life of one of America’s most revered artists.

Notes from a bibliophile on the lure of rare and first editions, the beauty of dust jackets, the thrill of browsing in antiquarian bookshops, the bibliomania of book thieves, movies about books, and the inner life of a reader. The Groaning Shelf is not so much a book about books as a book about books about books. These little essays capture the drama of bookish obsession, the joys and snares of the bookish life and the pleasures of bibliophily.

“A brilliant and savagely witty skewing of the combatants on all sides of the academic culture wars . . . pitch-perfect . . . incisive and hilarious.” —The Washington Post Decades ago, a slim parody of academic literary criticism called The Pooh Perplex became a surprise bestseller. Here, Frederick Crews has written an ingenious new satire in the same vein. Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh convened at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, Postmodern Pooh brilliantly parodies the academic fads and figures that hold sway in a new millennium, from poststructuralist Marxism to cultural studies. “Crews made me laugh until I wept.” —Philadelphia Inquirer “A fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.” —The New York Times “Sparkling wit and brilliant parodies.” —Los Angeles Times “Really good academic fun.” —The Boston Globe “Crews sinks his fangs into more recent movements, such as deconstructionism, new historicism, radical feminism, trauma studies, postcolonialism, and cybercriticism [and] magnanimously skewer[s] radicals and archconservatives alike . . . will keep anyone interested in literary scholarship in stitches.” —Library Journal

Victor Erlich was born in 1914, at the threshold of what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called "the real twentieth century," in Petrograd, a place indelibly marked by that century's violent dislocations and upheavals. His story, begun on the eve of the First World War and taking him through Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the U. S. Army, is in many ways a memoir of that "real twentieth century," reflecting its lethal nature and shaped by the "fearful symmetry" of the age of totalitarianism. To read about Erlich's life growing up at the intersection of the century's darkest currents is to experience history firsthand from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Second World War--and to know what it truly is to be a child of the century. Throughout, despite the darkness, even the horror, of much of what he describes, the author maintains the beguiling tone and the warm manner of one who has reached the new millennium with rare and hard-won insight into the human comedy of his time.

NAMED ONE OF THE “100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—this “rigorously historical” (The Washington Post) and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America keep out “inferiors” in the 1920s is “a sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration” (Booklist). A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than forty years. Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his trademark lively and authoritative style, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is “a masterful, sobering, thoughtful, and necessary book” that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

The first Texas-based writer to gain national attention, J. Frank Dobie proved that authentic writing springs easily from the native soil of Texas and the Southwest. In best-selling books such as Tales of Old-Time Texas, Coronado's Children, and The Longhorns, Dobie captured the Southwest's folk history, which was quickly disappearing as the United States became ever more urbanized and industrial. Renowned as "Mr. Texas," Dobie paradoxically has almost disappeared from view—a casualty of changing tastes in literature and shifts in social and political attitudes since the 1960s. In this lively biography, Steven L. Davis takes a fresh look at a J. Frank Dobie whose "liberated mind" set him on an intellectual journey that culminated in Dobie becoming a political liberal who fought for labor, free speech, and civil rights well before these causes became acceptable to most Anglo Texans. Tracing the full arc of Dobie's life (1888–1964), Davis shows how Dobie's insistence on "free-range thinking" led him to such radical actions as calling for the complete integration of the University of Texas during the 1940s, as well as taking on governors, senators, and the FBI (which secretly investigated him) as Texas's leading dissenter during the McCarthy era.